Attempts to drain the mine by the waterwheel and a viaduct had been a disaster. So too had the notorious Over Haddon gold rush of 1894. People could be such optimists.
One consequence of the mining was that the water table had been lowered. In dry weather the River Lathkill ran dry. Even in the average summer there was little more than a trickle. The water surged back to the surface at Bubble Springs. But it also emerged here, from these soughs, the drainage tunnels dug by the miners to channel floodwater out of the mineshafts.
Cooper had managed to gather a makeshift team together to make inquiries around Lathkill Dale.
‘We need to find out if anyone saw Reece Bower in this area on Sunday, or anyone related to the case,’ he said. ‘I’m particularly interested in sightings of Evan Slaney.’
‘Slaney?’ said Luke Irvine.
‘Annette Bower’s father. You’ve all got copies of his photograph. But anything else you can come up with may be valuable.’
‘What if someone stole the wallet from him and decided to dispose of it here in Lathkill Dale?’ said Irvine. ‘That would make our efforts pointless.’
‘I don’t think that can be what happened, Luke. Consider the blood on the wallet, and the cash and cards still in it.’
‘Well, it’s a line of inquiry.’
‘No, it’s a line of speculation,’ said Cooper. ‘Not the same thing.’
‘But—’
‘Luke, can we get on? There’s a lot of ground to cover.’
‘Yes, boss.’
Cooper looked at Villiers.
‘The schools are back, aren’t they?’ he said.
‘Yes, autumn term started this week.’
‘Thank goodness.’
Just over a year ago, a thirteen-year-old girl had fallen from a crag in a nearby dale while catching Pokémon on her mobile phone. She’d cracked her skull on a rock in the river bed and never woke from the resulting coma. In the past, there had been drownings in reservoirs or flooded quarries, children lost in caves or trapped in abandoned mine workings. But this year, they’d managed to get through the school holidays without a single fatality.
‘At least we won’t have any kids wandering about getting in the way,’ he said.
Cooper looked at the map and considered the bottom end of the dale. A long series of eleven weirs led down towards Conksbury Bridge, the deepest of them known as The Blue Waters because to its colour. At Conksbury was the site of a deserted medieval village. Sometimes visitors would park at the bridge and walk up river towards Haddon. He mentally marked that end as a lower priority. It would have to wait until last.
Several members of Cave Rescue had come down the trail in their yellow-and-red oversuits with torches and helmet lamps.
‘There’s a cave here.’
‘Let me look.’
The ground rose slightly, then dipped steeply into the cave mouth. The rocks above the cave lay tilted diagonally in cracked and broken strata, as if the earth had sunk on the downstream side. It was a distinctive opening, a dead black drop into the unknown.
And Cooper knew this cave.
He’d visited here as a child, been taken for a Sunday afternoon walk along the river by his grandparents one day during the summer holidays. The old man had his own way of warning children away from dangerous situations. Halfway along the dale, they’d stopped at this exact spot, and Granddad Cooper had pointed at the cave mouth. ‘A monster lives in there,’ he said. ‘If small children get too close to the cave, they get sucked inside by the monster. He eats them all up, and he spits their bones into the river.’
In his recollections, Cooper could see himself staring wide-eyed into the dark cave mouth, picturing the monster. He had no details, but his imagination could fill in the gaps. It was something big enough to eat a child, a thing that lived in the dark. Not human, but no kind of animal he knew of either. He pictured teeth, claws, and a pair of red eyes which might even now be staring at him out of the darkness, waiting for him to get too close. He’d taken a step back nervously. And he remembered Matt laughing, sniggering at the thought of young Ben being sucked in by the cave monster. Or scoffing at the knowledge that his younger brother actually believed the old stories.
Cooper shook his head, trying to clear the memory. He looked around, found he’d taken an unconscious step back from the cave, as if he still believed in that child-eating monster.
‘And he spits their bones into the river,’ he said quietly.
‘What did you say, Ben?’
He turned and saw Carol Villiers had come within earshot. Embarrassed, he pointed at the cave.
‘We need to get this checked out.’
‘How far in does it go?’ asked Villiers.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never been inside.’
The controller rubbed his beard. ‘We’ll take a look,’ he said.
Across the trail, a muddy path strewn with dead leaves led up to the remains of the mine itself. Cooper noticed signs along the edge of the trail marking the locations of abandoned shafts. The signs said ‘Danger, please keep out’. They were polite, anyway.
Further up the dale, Lathkill Head Cave was still dry this morning. A few feet inside, the roof lowered suddenly, leaving only space for a tight, muddy crawl over huge boulders. That crawl might be possible for a fit person when the river was dry, but in wet conditions you would probably need breathing apparatus to avoid drowning in the icy cold water pouring over your head.
‘Someone find out what the weather was like in October ten years ago,’ said Cooper.
‘I’ll get right on to it,’ said Irvine, pulling out his phone.
‘I remember,’ said Murfin. ‘It had been chucking it down off and on for a couple of weeks. It was like monsoon season. It was one of the reasons the SIO held off starting a search in Lathkill Dale. She was hoping for the rain to stop.’
‘Superintendent Branagh didn’t mention that.’
‘It would have been a nightmare trying to slide about in the mud on those slopes,’ said Murfin. ‘Our blokes would have been trampling any forensic evidence out of existence in that quagmire. And besides, there was water pouring out of those channels.’
‘The soughs.’
Murfin nodded. ‘Trust me, it was wet.’
‘Thanks, Gavin.’
Right now, you would never imagine that a river emerged here. Yet on that day in October ten years ago, a huge volume of water would have been gushing out over these rocks. There would have been no way of getting to the mouth of the cave without getting your feet wet, and battling across the rush of the water.
Carol Villiers came up and saw Cooper staring at the cave entrance.
‘No, Lacey Bower said it was a cave with a lot of water flowing out of it. She was quite clear about that.’
Cooper bit his lip. ‘This is it. This is the cave the water flows out of. It’s just not flowing now, not at this time of year. Water seeps down into the limestone, and there hasn’t been much rain, so at the moment it’s dry. In the winter, in wet weather, the rock can’t absorb all the water that runs into the dale. So it emerges here, from this cave. That’s why it’s called Lathkill Head. It’s where the River Lathkill starts.’
‘I’ve checked the weather anyway,’ said Irvine. ‘The day that Annette Bower actually disappeared was relatively fine. Rain early in the morning, but it cleared up. The next day was wet, and so was the rest of the week. Gavin was right. The climate was against the inquiry team.’